On To Shanghai

We had tickets for the high speed train to Shanghai, the class of "soft seats." The Railway Station South was sleek and modern, but when I tried to buy a lock for my bag, it turned out that the high end shops only sold items for conspicuous consumption--brand names like Diesel, or expensive watches, nothing more practical than Chinese candy and water. It was a wasted effort, it turned out: we were the only ones in the car of soft seats, ample leg room, sit down toilets. (There was a higher class than ours, which was full.) Two cars down Asian families had spread out their meals and filled the aisle with trash, and the squat toilets were already in need of service.

A Railway Station

Leaving Beijing, the countryside was sad, flat fields with lone individuals working fields of crops, rarely a tractor. Through the smog the landscape was muddy and dusty, with murky channels of water. At one point we passed through a tunnel to immortal Asia, mountains, beautiful rock cols, in the mysterious smog, a golden god over a temple. These were the rocks and scrubby vegetation of Chinese paintings, in hilly countours, pagodas and lagoons. And then the land was obscured by forests and dusty earth.

Shanghai

Another tunnel took us back to the smog and dust-obscured housing construction, and always some individuals with hoes. Power lines marched across the land, across bulldozers on flat rubble. The air became sooty and a haze settled thickly close to the earth, barely revealing silhouettes of reeds and poplars.

Another tunnel and the land was more variable, crops and landscaping, villages of cement blocks, organized by ribbons of soft dust roads. But where the bulldozer stood was a sense of despair. Now mountains again, rocky banks of rivers, landscaped and terraced. Piles of hay on the fields, groups of farmers and their red wooden carts.

Shanghai

And then we were in Shanghai, reaching a taxi stand three deep, as the taxis methodically peeled off and zoomed away. Everywhere skyscrapers, no remnants of other centuries. We sped into the moist air. Shanghai taxi drivers, we would learn, are always in life-or-death races to the next interminable traffic light. Following the map we'd shown him (he spoke no English) and confused by the byzantine roads of the university campus, the taxi driver was kind enough to call the number we'd been given (the father of one of our home exchange partners). Suddenly there was a loud barrage of thick Chinese, and a short thickish man, slightly gray, jumped into the taxi. The one word we could decipher was "welcome."

Whither?

our stairway

The apartment building was dreary as a Soviet tenement, covered with sooty metal railings. You turned on the corridor light by stomping on the cement stairs. The gray unpainted stairway was stencilled everywhere with 8-11 digit numbers. Metal grates covered the doors, along with red and gold stencils and grime. We reached ours, #501. Inside, despite a delicately molded ceiling and some wood flooring, was an abandoned array of depressing cheap furniture veiled in sooty dust.  But the bed had made in pastel greens and pinks and small soft towels hung everywhere. And Dr. Li was determined, at least, to get the wifi working for us.

Shanghai

For the first time in our experience of home exchanges (20 so far), we'd been had. What had been promised was a bright series of rooms in sweet silken fabrics. Instead, the neglected rooms are dusty and grimey, with little electrical assistance. In awkward, medieval Beijing we had been cocooned in Western comfort. Here we had exchanged our Paris apartment, a number of whose appliances had been left broken, whose cupboards had been cleaned out by the charming Chinese girls, for this. Dr. Li, in heavily accented English, explains that the apartment has been empty for 5 years. Jacques and I are each, in our way, busily trying to understand what's going on. (Jacques will never blame such sweet girls.) This was not what the home exchange site promised ("squeaky clean, internet, phone") but too late, they've removed the listing. Dr. Li insists on making us tea with the singular appliance, a hot plate, showing us how to plug in the water heater, how to mop off the bathroom floor after a shower--the shower is a spigot in the wall, and the mop is filthy. We will be here for 2 1/2 weeks.

our view

Dr. Li grows despondent when he can't connect us to the campus wifi network--even offers to leave us his computer! He then perks up considerably when I ask him where to get water. (Tap water is not potable in China, because of the pipes it runs through.)

Next door is a university campus, with a sweet order to it, all that was missing in the apartment we were to inhabit. As if into a long-forgotten memory of college days, we stroll into a grassy realm of  constant birdsong in moist air and gentle, milling life, from our Soviet-era tenement. And, in fact, as we climb the steps everyday we can glimpse interiors of other apartments that have been made lovely, with Ming furniture and renovated kitchens. 

A neighborhood worker...

Dr. Li rushes us to the gate where we can refill our plastic gallons for 1 yuan (10 cents). Madame Li, fragile and apparently ill, totters delicately behind. He shows us the faculty canteen. The campus is active with young and old, jogging and exercising. A little convenience store sells us some Kleenexes to try to clean up the place.

...smiles for a photo!

In the morning we walk back onto the campus to get a steaming hot Nescafé (only instant coffee for the next 2 1/2 weeks) and find a tai chi group on a basketball court, finishing the form, starting fan and sword. We smile and nod and exercise alongside them, I practicing my own tai chi form, Jacques his calisthenics. 

In fact, that would be our nourishment, the beauty of the morning: older people doing tai qi and qi gong, stretching, music piped on campus or brought by the groups of exercisers. Old men eyeing Jacques competitively, chin-up for chin-up. Middle-aged couples playing ball games before 6am. Eventually I abandon the tennis court and use a leafy park for my solitary form, beneath a weeping willow on marble flagstones, while a child or two, just after dawn, plays on the swing set.

Mao on campus